Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2005/060

Compact E-Cash

Jan Camenisch and Susan Hohenberger and Anna Lysyanskaya

Abstract: This paper presents efficient off-line anonymous e-cash schemes
where a user can withdraw a wallet containing 2^l coins each of which she can spend unlinkably. Our first result is a scheme, secure under the strong RSA and the y-DDHI assumptions, where the complexity of the withdrawal and spend operations is O(l+k)
and the user's wallet can be stored using O(l+k) bits, where k is a security parameter.
The best previously known schemes require at least one of these complexities to
be O(2^l k).
In fact, compared to previous e-cash schemes, our whole wallet of 2^l coins
has about the same size as one coin in these schemes.
Our scheme also offers exculpability
of users, that is, the bank can prove to third parties that a user has
double-spent.

We then extend our scheme to our second result, the first e-cash scheme that provides traceable coins without a trusted third party.
That is, once a user has double spent one of the 2^l coins in her wallet, all her spendings of these coins can be traced.
We present two alternate constructions. One construction shares the same complexities with our first result but requires a strong bilinear map assumption that is only conjectured to hold on MNT curves. The second construction works on more general types of elliptic curves, but the price for this is that the complexity of the spending and of the withdrawal protocols becomes O(lk) and O(lk + k^2) bits, respectively, and wallets take O(lk) bits of storage.
All our schemes are secure in the random oracle model.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols /

Publication Info: An extended abstract of this paper appeared at Eurocrypt 2005.